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The Charles Lamb Bulletin the Journal of the Charles Lamb Society The Charles Lamb Bulletin The Journal of the Charles Lamb Society April 2006 New Series No. 134 Contents: Dick Clancey Issue Articles GEORGE BILGERE: ‘Lines for Dick Clancey’ 29 JEANNE COLLERAN: ‘In Memory of Richard Wallace Clancey’ 30 PAUL BETZ: ‘Irreverent Glimpses of the Poet Laureate: Three Informal Portraits of William Wordsworth’ 32 FREDERICK BURWICK: ‘Death and Revisitation in The Prelude: Cartmel Priory and Furness Abbey’ 37 BRUCE GRAVER: ‘Disturbed with Joy’ 50 DUNCAN WU: ‘Adventures with Dick Clancey’ 56 JOHN POWELL WARD: ‘Dick Clancey: A Brief Memoir’ 62 Society Notes and News from Members CHAIRMAN’S NOTES 64 DUNCAN WU: ‘In Memoriam – Robert Woof’ 66 Editor’s Note Inasmuch as all the articles in this issue were commissioned, I wish to thank each contributor. Every individual whom I contacted consented, eagerly, to provide a personal tribute, a creative work, or a critical essay concerning a shared interest or some aspect of Dick’s research with which they are familiar. 29 Lines for DICK CLANCEY And so spring comes to Cleveland Like a late train that does not carry you Back to sunsets above Lake Erie’s Enormous thaw, the blue floes Cracking and groaning below us As we walked along the narrow path Leading from your lakeside pad, The cozy, book-filled apartment A lifetime teaching Wordsworth and the Bard Had finally let you afford. After our weekly dinners together Full of good talk, and Mozart rising From that ancient thing You proudly called “Mein Plattenspieler,” We did our brisk mile Down to this stony promontory Where the ice rode the lake’s shoulders, The sun glittered on the city, And I would not let you leave Until I’d heard some Tintern Abbey, Declaimed above the wind, Sonorous and mock heroic, Turning serious toward the end. Now I’m standing here alone, old friend. Dinner was a quiet affair, Lacking only poems and music And your sudden laughter. And so I say to the breaking lake That I have felt a presence That disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts, a sense sublime— But there my memory fails me. Speechless, I stay a little longer Though the wind off the lake is bitter. Despite the spring’s arrival The weather still feels like winter. —George Bilgere John Carroll University 30 In Memory of Richard Wallace Clancey By JEANNE COLLERAN WHEN I JOINED THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT AT JOHN CARROLL, my alma mater, I became re-acquainted with many of my former teachers. Most of them, it seemed to me, had changed little. Except for Dick Clancey. When had he become a Romanticist? During my undergraduate years, he taught Eighteenth Century Literature; when had he migrated to the Nineteenth? We are what and whom we teach, I thought, and Dick belonged to the Neoclassical Age. He embodied the virtues of that age: he was orderly, decorous, witty, and learned. He was a conversationalist, like Johnson, a moralist, like Swift, and an urbane gentleman, like Steele. He belonged in coffeehouses, not daffodil fields. I soon found that it was not only Dick’s subject area that had shifted: he had also changed as a teacher. Back in my time, Dick was, truth be told, a little frightening. In class he was formal, reserved, and rigorous. We felt his disapproval. I was “Miss Colleran” then—no student had a first name in Dick’s class—and we could all be checked by a cocked eyebrow and pursed lip. We respected him, so we never spoke to him. When I visited his class as a colleague, my jaw dropped. Dick had become a pedagogical contortionist. He would do anything to draw half- answers from reluctant lips, transform them into small pearls of insight, and give them back to their owner. His natural high energy level tripled in the classroom: he cajoled, declaimed, mimicked, persuaded. Far from the somewhat distant teacher I had remembered, Dick was like an enthusiastic uncle who won’t let you leave the room without pressing a rolled-up dollar in your hand. His sternness had utterly evaporated into an irresistible combination of erudition and kindness. And he was obviously very happy, content to be where and what he was: a gifted teacher. Dick Clancey was older than almost every member of our department by about two decades. No matter: few of us could keep up with him. He bounded up steps and bustled down hallways. He was, of course, an esteemed member of the University: he had won the Distinguished Faculty Award, published Wordsworth’s Classical Undersong, and seemed to cross the Atlantic every other month to give lectures in England. But in our hallways, we thought of Dick as the one who held the department together. His method was simple: he befriended every one of us. He also tried to fix most any difficulty that came along—teaching extra classes, taking on extra advisees, interviewing new faculty members, even replacing our ancient department refrigerator. His absolute courtesy, especially to students, became an implicit standard. When I chaired the Department, he sent me several beautiful and elaborate flower arrangements; the cards were always signed, “Your friends in the Department,” but of course I knew the identity of the source who refused to be thanked. Sometimes, our (then) relatively young department tried his patience as we unpacked our new graduate school “isms” and seemed perilously close to throwing out the Great and the Beautiful. We never actually did, of course, but I know that if it were not for his unfailing courtesy, Dick would like to have asked a few of us why we thought our courses belonged in a Department of Literature rather than a Department of Sociology. The closest Dick and I ever came to an argument was when he decided to join me in hearing a lecture by Homi Bhaba at the MLA in San Francisco. I hadn’t invite Dick; I knew he wouldn’t like the entire panel, and I wasn’t in the mood to defend them. But he decided to come along, and after a somewhat tense discussion, we dropped the subject. That night, Dick told our interviewing team 31 In Memory of Richard Wallace Clancey that there was no use being in San Francisco if we didn’t go for drinks at the Top of the Mark Hopkins. And so we did, watching, of all things, a tango dancing exhibition. I learned two things that night: Dick valued the academic argument, but he valued his friends more. Dick Clancey was a funny combination of austerity and commotion. He was personally abstemious, always punctual and formally dressed. He sat on a hard wooden chair in his office behind an orderly desk on which lay neat piles of student papers sheathed in protective plastic. He lived so simply that he was able to store books in his completely unused (and very clean) oven. Yet, his old friend, Lou Pecek, speaking at his funeral, reminded us that Dick also enjoyed a fuss. He loved that his birthday was roundly celebrated, and he enormously enjoyed hosting lavish dinners. He happily gave guided tours of Cleveland’s gilded age past to our visitors, and he never missed a season of the Cleveland Orchestra. He was a funny combination of scrupulousness and merriment, perhaps best illustrated in the tale of the time he turned himself in to the police who had failed to give him a ticket for running a red light. The tale is often repeated among his friends—one of the fables of Dick’s life that we all know—because he told it on himself. When given the dark diagnosis of his cancer, Dick was neither scrupulous nor over-wrought. He took the sentence bravely and straightforwardly. I expected stoicism when I went to bid my friend goodbye. Instead I found something deeper: simplicity. I think his calmness must be what holiness looks like when all the layers of activity and energy and striving—all the fuss of living, all that getting and spending—are peeled away. Coleridge noted that his friend Wordsworth strove for an “austere purity of language”; I believe this austere purity is what drew Dick to his long years of study and scholarship about Wordsworth. It was a virtue he admired, and a virtue he possessed. I taught along side Dick Clancey for fifteen years. I miss him every day. John Carroll University 32 Irreverent Glimpses of the Poet Laureate: Three Informal Portraits of William Wordsworth By PAUL BETZ WORDWORTH’S PORTRAITS ALMOST INVARIABLY REFLECT HIS STATURE as England’s poet of nature, a figure of great dignity and moral standing. His appointment to the Laureateship in 1843 merely set the seal on a reputation long established. Sir Robert Peel, who was instrumental in Wordsworth’s acceptance of the Laureateship, aptly summarizes this reputation in his letter of condolence to William Wordsworth, Jr., on his father’s death: It is seldom that the tomb has closed on such a combination of great genius, with high principles and spotless conduct.1 Under these circumstances, it is slightly surprising that any portrait departed from the general reverence; but three (all by amateurs) did so. This brief article is provoked by the recent discovery of a second copy of one of these. It provides an opportunity to reproduce all three of the amusing portraits, and for contrast an example of the conventionally dignified variety.2 The Poet’s portrait by Margaret Gillies is one of the best of the conventional sort.3 The engraving reproduced here, published in New York, is based on a watercolor on ivory painted by Miss Gillies during her visit to the Wordsworth home at Rydal Mount in 1839.
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